The present invention relates to data center infrastructure, and more particularly, this invention relates to an appliance cloud for use in a data center.
While the need for elasticity of data center infrastructure has been debated in great length and the industry has already imagined multiple competitive ideas on how to make data centers more agile, there has been less emphasis on virtualizing security, e.g., firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), intrusion detection systems (IDS), and services, e.g., accelerators, virtual private network (VPN) termination, aspects of cloud ready data centers. Sharing infrastructure across multiple applications and clients is becoming increasingly common with server virtualization and distributed application architecture and recent trends indicate that an exponential increase in server-to-server communications (termed as east-west traffic in data center) as application become more and more distributive is most likely. Furthermore, with overlay network, e.g., virtual extensible local area network (VXLAN), and virtual machine (VM) mobility, it is becoming more difficult to create and manage firewall configurations for securing data centers, e.g., demilitarized zones (DMZs) separated by firewall(s) that allow only certain types of network traffic to enter or leave, within a data center according to traditional approaches.